Tap Pinchot's guidance to solve environmental challenges

The environmental news seems particularly grim this spring. Drought continues to bear down on the Plains and the southwest. The East has borne the brunt of an erratic climate, which is generating a series of punishing super storms and fickle levels of precipitation. Across Pennsylvania, housing developments and mineral and gas extraction are taking ever-larger bites out of Penn's Woods.

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By Char Miller

poconorecord.com

By Char Miller

Posted Apr. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By Char Miller
Posted Apr. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM

» Social News

The environmental news seems particularly grim this spring. Drought continues to bear down on the Plains and the southwest. The East has borne the brunt of an erratic climate, which is generating a series of punishing super storms and fickle levels of precipitation. Across Pennsylvania, housing developments and mineral and gas extraction are taking ever-larger bites out of Penn's Woods.

One could easily (and understandably) lose hope, and give in to the Green Blues, a term one of my friends coined to describe the dispiriting response to the multi-layered environmental problems associated with climate disruption.

Offering a more positive perspective is a new documentary, "Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot," which airs this month across Pennsylvania public television stations (local listings). It accents the positive, not in a sugarcoated way that obscures the pressing dilemmas that confront us. But rather by demonstrating that there is substantive action we can take to make our communities more habitable, just, and resilient.

For the record, I served as a historical consultant to the filmmakers, shot mostly at Pinchot's Milford home, Grey Towers, and have written a companion book by the same name that will be published in September. My close association with the project was driven by my conviction that we need to identify the steps environmental groups and policy makers are and should be taking to regenerate the health of the land and of the people it sustains.

This strategy is a core principle of Gifford Pinchot's practical conservationism. As the first chief of the Forest Service (1905-1910), he was instrumental in developing the federal regulations that brought the Allegheny National Forest into being. Of special interest to him as a forester, and later during his two terms as Pennsylvania's governor, was the crucial role that healthy forests played in protecting the mountainous watersheds that nurtured the growing metropolitan area. He recognized that whatever happened upstream would have significant downstream consequences.

His ideas live on, "Seeking the Greatest Good" demonstrates, in the ecological restoration work the Forest Service continues to promote in the United States and abroad.

In the Delaware River watershed, which supplies potable water to more than 15 million people living in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the federal agency is collaborating with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation and 30 public and private partners to enhance forest cover along the river's upper reaches. By funding landowners to better manage their lands, the collaboration, known as Common Waters, is rebuilding a strong sense of community responsibility for this vital and shared resource.

As innovative is a project in Oregon called the Forest Health-Human Health Initiative that seeks to keep privately owned forests in the hands of aging landowners by directly connecting innovative health coverage options for them with new markets for their forest carbon.

Gifford Pinchot would have been thrilled to know his practical approach to resource management and social betterment has survived into the 21st-century. Yet we are also lucky to have this rich legacy to guide our actions as we face an array of pressures that Pinchot and his Progressive Era peers could not have imagined.

Seeking the Greatest Good — as a documentary film and a form of principled conservation activism — opens the way to hope.

WVIA TV will broadcast an original documentary on the legacy of Gifford Pinchot's conservation philosophy at 7 tonight.

Char Miller teaches in the Environmental Analysis Program at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. He is the author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism and the forthcoming Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot.